


••• - •- -•--

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Light Angst, Not Canon Compliant, i love completely disregarding canon in favor of sappy bullshit, mulder gets kidnapped but are we rlly surprised, scully kicks ass to get him back but again are we really surprised!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-25 17:04:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18265661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: The fear in her chest is an old friend, but those are the ones that often hide the most.





	••• - •- -•--

**Author's Note:**

> i'm currently watching the show for the first time and im abt halfway through s4 so this has - as far as i'm concerned - no place in canon or anything like tht, it's just an idea tht kept coming to me and wouldnt leave me alone!

The fear in her chest is an old friend. Hell, might even be family at this point. She's fed it and given it a home for longer than most things, but still she doesn't know its every move, its every peak.

The fear in her chest is an old friend, but those are the ones that often hide the most.

When it sinks its hooks into her throat, she welcomes it, letting it clear the way for adrenaline. When it shocks up and down her spine she doesn't question. But its when she feels it in the very base of her heart, infecting each pulsation of the already tight muscle, that she almost falters. _Almost._

If she's learned one thing it's that if there is time to come after, after whatever new horror, then that's when you fall apart. If it's at night to a pillow and nothing more, or in a bathroom stall desperately trying to hide your shoes so no one can tell it's you doesn't matter, as long as it's after.

But here, she almost thinks that her body can't compute an after to this. Her heart stutters and zeroes with each move she makes, resetting and trying again after each misstep.

As she slams into another door, busts its lock under an already bruised and possibly out of socket shoulder, it rubberbands in a wave of nausea from her stomach to the base of her skull. A warning. There isn't a soul to be found in this room either, and her chances are dwindling.

Still, she's beaten odds far slimmer than these. _They_ have beaten odds far slimmer than these.

So she does what she knows how to do best, she keeps going. She keeps going to him.

"Mulder!"

Her voice is shot through with silver, slick but solidifying with each breath she takes because faintly, in the distance, she can hear metal upon metal. Handcuffs on old piping if she has ever known a sound.

_"Mulder!"_

Her shoes click incessantly as she moves over the concrete floor, her flashlight beam bobbing on unsteady tides. The clanging is getting louder and her heart is thumping harder and she doesn't think she's going to be able to breathe for a very long time.

The hall is swallowing her up, the grayness of everything blackening if she looks too long in one corner or another, but she can see the door at the end and she just keeps _pushing._ Pushing herself, pushing luck, pushing down the bile in her throat.

She doesn't hit the door so much as she crashes into it and that raging force flings it open with a snap. Her coat shakes out around the edges, catching on splintered wood and ripping as she comes to a half-halt to scan the room.

Their suspect is nowhere to be found, not in the shadowy corners and not waging war with her and her rattling heart by holding a knife or a screwdriver or whatever the hell else above the slumped form on the far wall. Still, she sweeps the room before she listens to the pounding in her jail cell ribs.

Crouching beside him, she takes his face in her hands and props it up. His lips are a particular shade of blue she's never seen outside of magazines and his eyelids are threaded with veins that zig and zag all the way across those freckles that only show after a long summer. They arch down to meet his unkempt jawline, and from there shoot bolts down his straining throat.

"Mulder, can you hear me?" she asks as she gently pulls at his eyelid to check his pupils. Unresponsive, just like him. 

"Damn it- how much did he give you?"

She manages to get something out of him then, splintered lips and cracked tongue coughing up something that she thinks is her name. It's a start, she acquiesces.

As she fumbles through his pockets for the key to his cuffs, he murmurs something else that she still can't quite make out, but it's less gutteral than the last, at least. 

"Hold on," she says, doesn't know who it's more for, as she plucks the key between her raw fingers and undoes the cuffs. His hand falls dully to the floor, skin smacking concrete in that sick way it does, and she feels something curdle inside her when she sees the blankness of the skin in between the near-black veins that crawl up from his wrists.

She curses to herself as she folds an arm under and around him and hauls him to his feet as much as she can. His height has never helped in situations like these, but here it's a holy burden - so much extra person that folds and folds but can't control where it goes. 

She'd be wilting right about now if it weren't for the fact that she could feel his heart hammering through the side that was pressed against her. An erratic heartbeat can be corrected, slow can be sped, fast can be calmed, it's the absence that is so much harder to fix, so she feels that and she keeps going.

He mutters whatever it is he's stuck on again, and this time she hears a definite S at the beginning expelled between tightly pressed teeth. 

"I'm here," she says before repeating, "How much did he give you?" It's right about now she's wishing for that silent, smart mouth of his, some kind of murmured comment to make her smile despite herself or an answer wrapped in an assertion. Anything.

But all she gets is more of the same.

They break free from the hall and stumble out into the main area of the building, what she figures must have been the cutting room floor. The windows are almost all busted out, letting in stretches of dusty light that help her pick their way through the debris littering the floor. 

She tries not to pay attention to the way the unnatural color is spreading up his forerams, but were she Orpheus, he would surely disappear.

The entrance she stormed is still propped open with the brick she left there, and she forces him through first before she ever crosses the threshold. 

The sky is still on fire around them, orange and pink and a glaring red that she feels all over herself, in every molecule of her being.

He trips over himself, and before she can right him, he's on his ass in the crushed gravel that still surrounds the place. Without thinking, she's right there beside him, knees pinching painfully against the crushed gravel littered about.

"Come on, stay with me," she tells him when his eyes start to stay shut longer than they're open. "Don't you hear the ambulance coming up the hill?"

His mouth rolls into a grimace before she can even finish her sentence, and his eyes furl shut as something rocks his body - not a convulsion and not chills, though it still seems involuntary.

"Mulder, look at me," she starts, her thumb swiping, pressing, at the corner of his mouth. "Look at me."

His eyes drag open, though it's a strained motion she doesn't think he'll be able to keep up for long. 

"You're going to be fine - okay? I promise."

It's no secret that in most lines of work even remotely akin to their's they tell you not to promise things like that. Don't write a check for a miracle, because you cannot make one. But she doesn't let her tongue hesitate even a second as she says it. 

Dana Scully has wanted to believe in so many things in her life, but if there are two that she'll never doubt, it's miracles and Fox Mulder.

He blinks up at her, a long, deliberate thing that she nods along to as she moves to tuck her hair behind her ears. It's as close as he can get to a response, but she still takes it for everything it's worth.

The paramedics sweep in not long after that, trying to banish her toward the outer rim as if she doesn't know what she's doing. As if she hasn't managed to keep him alive this long - both today and years before.

So she's back to flashing her badge, flashing her knowledge, elbowing her way back into the inner sanctum with the words she can never seem to go a day without saying ("I'm a medical doctor and this man needs-") She figures one day she won't have to say that any more, and maybe then she'll regret not having relished in it when she could, but for now it's led on her tongue.

They, the two medics and the one almost unconscious Mulder, tumble their way up and into the ambulance, the driver waiting to slam the doors behind them. Mulder's still mumbling, even as they try to put the oxygen over his mouth, and Scully's intent of following behind in their rental is starting to dissolve.

"Ma'am?" the driver asks, looking at her with bright impatience, and she knows it's now or never.

She tosses her keys over to the nearest uniform and shouts her instructions as she climbs into the back of the rig. He looks on, startled, but the last thing she sees as the doors clamp tight is him nodding acceptance.

As she sits, she does her best to stay out of the way where she can; watching on, taking note, ready to spill whatever knowledge is needed across the cool floor below them, but not keening for anything more. Her hands are still shaking and her chest is still tight and she needs to pull her threads back together for both her health and the man across from her. 

The taller of the paramedics reaches again for the oxygen mask, even gets it mostly over his mouth, but before he can place it Mulder grabs at his wrist, holding him off a second more, however weakly.

His lips turn again, and Scully is already moving, dipping her ear toward him in one motion as she grabs the mask with another. 

He looks ready to seize the moment, to finally get out whatever it is that's lodged in his throat, has been begging to be released for the past ten minutes, but instead he's met with a sputter to his lips that leaves them all feeling like they're gasping for breath.

"Take this," she murmurs to him, easing the mask down over his mouth. "Please," she adds even lower as she flicks her eyes to his, hoping it's enough to sway him despite knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is.

Reluctantly, he lets her, lets the air into his lungs to calm their rattle, lets the other two do what they must to suspend him until they arrive in the ambulance bay.

He lets all this happen, but he still reaches for her hand as they book it down the winding hospital hallways.

×××

His heartrate monitor keeps a steady enough rhythm that it fades into the background of her mind. As long as it doesn't decide to find its peaks and valleys again, she's completely tuned it out.

She's accustomed to all of it, actually. The machines and the tubes and the wires. The sterile smell that latches in her nose and mouth and is all she breathes. The steady rotation of nurses in and out to check vital signs that she's already checked ten minutes before. Even the chair she sits happily-uncomfortable in is something in her rolodex that she can pluck from memory after memory.

The only thing she still hasn't gotten used to is seeing him in that bed.

×××

When he comes to, the first thing Mulder registers is the way his body feels like its been dunked in salt water and left to dry in the hardback sun.

He can feel the pain in every passage of veins, a gruelling sort of thing so deep he wants to drag his nails across his skin until he can pluck them out one by one. He doesn't, but he thinks that thought will be waiting in the wings for a good long while.

And that's before he even opens his eyes.

It's dark out, moonlit sky extrapolating between the slats of still open blinds, but he gets the sense that it's not the same night he remembers falling asleep in. The only other light is a small lamp somewhere above him, casting low light that does nothing for his pale, thin skin. He looks fragile, even from his own estimates - battered and bruised and made from poorly picked and sewn together parts.

He can't help but think he doesn't deserve the smile he finds waiting for him, not in this state. That doesn't stop her though. Neither does the obvious tiredness in the lines of her face, the weariness in her eyes only half shielded by her oversized glasses. He wouldn't doubt that she's been awake since he checked out, refusing to sleep until he resurfaced.

"How are you feeling?" she asks, lips tilted halfway into the approximation of that smirk. She drops a bookmark into the book in her lap, the pages of which look mostly untouched, and reaches over herself for the cup of water sat to her right, all so as not to strain the arm held close to her chest in a bruise blue sling.

"Like I did all those years of missed college partying in one night," he says as he takes the offered straw in his mouth, and even his voice has paid a toll, coming out low yet still, oddly enough, breathy. 

"That's not going away anytime soon," she informs him, replacing the cup in its resting place, but not leaning back again just yet. "The toxicology report came back a few hours ago, but we still aren't entirely sure what was in the mixture he dosed you with. Though they're fairly certain it wasn't enough to cause lasting damage."

He rolls his neck to face her head on, whatever he can pull together of a smile stuck to his face. "Small mercies."

She reaches for his forehead, fingertips hesitating only slightly before setting to gently brushing back the hair there. Her eyes don't quite meet his, instead focusing on her own repetitive movement as she replies, "Small mercies, indeed."

They lapse into silence, content to just be in one another's waking presence again. Even though it's been a while, situations like these always make them feel like they're still figuring out how this thing between them works. Which usually means silence, as that's the one thing they've never had to figure out - even when they were unlearning and relearning the way they simply orbited around one another, their silence was always untouched.

"Mulder," she says after some time, her hand slowing until it's holding the side of his face. "In the ambulance- you kept trying to tell me something."

It takes a second for the question to take hold in his still sluggish mind, but it takes no time at all for the answer to come back to him. 

She watches him curiously, one brow raising ever so slightly, waiting for his return as her thumb moves slowly along his temple.

He smiles, slow and sure, if a little pained, and says "Stay," his voice as surefooted as it has ever been. 

She exhales something then, deep and shaken, and closes her eyes. 

He can tell then, in that simple action, that he had walked the line of living and not closer than she was letting on. He can tell then that her fear was more than she'll ever tell him. 

He manages to bump the length of his nose against her palm, a simple thing so quick it's almost as of it never happened, but he tries to put as much reassurance in it as he can. 

She gives him one last piece of her smile before she leans back, settling into her seat. Her restrained hand rests in a fist by her heart, but the other gravitates toward him, landing somewhere near his own. Neither of them take the other's hand, and while he dozes in and out she picks up where she left off in her book, but the proximity is still enough to quell any residual worry in either of their chests.

×××

The final time that he comes to before he checks back out for more than his fair share of hours is because he feels a presence that is decidedly not Scully's by his head. His eyes flicker around, lagging despite the urgency he tries to inflict into them, but it's all for naught.

A nurse with an expression fixed in kindness scribbles a few things onto his chart before looking down over him.

"Anything I can do for you, Mr. Mulder?" she asks softly, voice barely able to be heard over the thrum of his heart.

He shakes his head, and with that she's gone in a flurry of bright scrubs.

He doesn't think he'll be able to go back to sleep easily, so he casts about for something to look at. He lands, of course, on the slumped form still in the chair beside him.

Her book is now heavily battered - the spine cracked and the pages ruffled - lying steepled over her lap as a makeshift bookmark, threatening to fall any second. Not that she's aware she needs to mind. Her fist props her head up, but it's still slightly slumped from the deadweight of sleep that's draped over her. Her cheek presses up into her glasses, which sit skewed across her nose in the way he knows she hates, and breath passes her lips to ruffle the hair that's come loose from her low ponytail.

But for the first time in the weeks they've been working the case, she looks as if she's found her reprieve.

He loses something then, looking at her still in the same dusty pantsuit she'd come blazing in after him in. Loses a piece of tension, feels it slither away from his face, leaving it slack in the awe and wonder he always finds for her in between his cracked ribs. 

He loses a piece of a version of himself he hadn't even realized he'd been holding onto. He's unsurprised to find that he doesn't mind that at all.

Head rested against a thin pillow, and eyes still swimming with residual sleep, he's more than happy to take up her post- watching over her until she wakes.

×××

He gets released quicker than any of them thought he would, but that's his way. Bouncing back with enough force to bowl over everything in his way.

His office smells like a second layer of dust when he flips the buzzing light on, pausing in the doorway to admire with eyes that had thought they'd never see it again and to rest his still tight lungs. 

They take their respective seats, Scully flipping through the case file he'd passed her in the hallway, humming her distaste like a rapidfire chorus. He can't help but huff a small laugh under his breath as he watches her, waiting for her feet on the ground theory.

She looks up, lips already pursing, but eyes alight with a twinkle he knows well. He inclines his head slightly, and she expells a breath before unlatching her case and spreading her facts in the air around them.

 _Stay_ , he asks of her in every rebuttal he fires back, but not before having made sure he can unequivacoly make that promise too.

**Author's Note:**

> the title is, as youve probably guessed by now, morse code tht translates to "stay"
> 
> im on tumblr @foxmulldr !!


End file.
